Service providers and corporations build engineering and support labs to validate new services, support customers, and extend their customer reach. To maintain and run these labs, institutions are investing heavily in network engineering professionals, buildings, and equipment. However, most current manual and device based lab methodologies are time consuming to construct and scale poorly for large projects. This, in turn, prevents reusability of lab test scenarios and severely reduces the ability to preserve “best practice” qualities.
Moreover, components for use in computer networks are generally complicated to use and expensive to manufacture. Often, their production runs are small and require a large amount of development resources to produce. For at least these reasons it can be expensive to build additional components for testing purposes and for training people on operating the components. However, for companies and institutions that produce components for computer networks, there is a business need to verify the operability of these components for potential customers.
One solution that has been attempted is to set up various testing labs, for example, in different product sales regions, and install a number of components for testing and training purposes. As more components are developed, they are usually added to these individual systems to facilitate further testing and training. This requires manual interaction by an operator to both install the components and to test them. Complicating matters, installing the components can often be difficult, and these components must be properly integrated into a system to be tested. Further, most customer systems are quite diverse and usually require components to be tested either on their own systems or on similar systems with like components.
In addition, because each sales region is usually defined geographically, testing facilities can be numerous and are seldom standard in configuration or content. This also can make training on the use and maintenance of such systems difficult. For example, at present, people must be physically located at a testing/training facility to operate particular systems there. Labs are designed with in-place and loaned equipment and configured as close to the customer or production configuration as possible. Operational testing is done, results are gathered and analyzed, and the test configuration is disassembled to prepare for the next test configuration. Tools are unavailable for capturing and reusing device configurations, topologies, and network traffic activities. Lab scenarios and configurations are not documented and reused, and lab equipment utilization falls to about 20%.
Additionally, conventional network lab facilities tend to be large, physical installations. They can be thousands of square feet in size and represent millions of dollars in both capital and annual operating expenses. Staffing these facilities can often require between 30 and 100 network engineers. In this lab environment, engineers may only be able to accomplish approximately 20–30 major laboratory configurations per year. A lab operating model developed around these parameters generates a per lab cost basis of about $8,000 to $10,000 per lab per engineer. For each engineering test, this amounts to more than $200,000 being expended annually. These costs are extremely high given a usage rate of only approximately 20%. With the forecasted growth of network systems expected to increase significantly, the potential for engineering costs to increase is high.
There exists a need for standardizing such facilities to facilitate the testing of components and systems, while providing a remote interface to allow users to access these facilities remotely to configure the facilities for testing and support, and for training people to use these systems in these facilities, thereby steadying the rising development and testing costs. It is to these ends that the present invention is directed.